9 March 2004 | ||||||
News,
Views, & Analysis Governments,
Lobbies, & the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know
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IT'S THE SAME OLD IRAQ, JUST A TINY BIT
WORSE THAN IT WAS LAST MONTH' ROBERT FISK in Baghdad The Independent (UK) - Monday, March 8, 2004 EACH TIME I return to Iraq, it's the same, like finding a razor blade in a bar of chocolate. The moment you start to believe that "New Iraq" might work - just - you get the proof that it's the same old Iraq, just a little tiny bit worse than it was last month. At the border yesterday morning it was all smiles. Passport formalities would be over in minutes. But $ 10 (pounds 5.40) would help. It did. That's what we used to do under Saddam - they are the same Iraqi officials, just not up to their previous standards of venality - but soon, no doubt, we'll be up to $ 15, or more. The bombed road bridge on the Baghdad highway has been repaired - despite the murder of the owner of the company rebuilding it five weeks ago. There's a three-mile convoy of new American troops humming westwards along the motorway - you can tell the new units because their Humvees and armour are forest green; the invasion tanks are in desert yellow - and all seems well until we stop to chat to the sheikh of the little mosque by the last petrol station before Ramadi. He says there are three "Ali Baba" cars waiting. They crashed into a civilian car and sent it spinning off the highway into the desert. We drive on at 110mph. The radio - BBC Arabic service, Iranian radio in Arabic, anything rather than the one run by the occupation authorities - announces a settlement with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani over the constitution that's supposed to be signed this morning. Iraq's leading Shia cleric doesn't want the Kurds to have a veto over the permanent constitution and wants more Shias on a five-person council. Then a Shia on the Governing Council - where everyone is handpicked by the Americans - speaks those words that always fill me with dread in the Middle East because they always turn out to be wrong. "We have reached an agreement," he said. "There is going to be very good news very soon." Well, we shall see. Baghdad is yellow and grey under a fierce wind and, with sinking heart, I see more walls. The massive concrete ramparts around Paul Bremer's consular headquarters, the hotels of westerners, of the Governing Council, of every American barracks are familiar. Now government ministries are to be hidden behind concrete. And woe betide those Iraqis who work for the Americans as translators and fail to heed warnings about "collaboration". Three of them ignored the threat. One, a Christian, was shot dead in her car in the Zeyouna quarter, a second wounded with her, their driver also was shot dead. I arrive at my dingy hotel and find that yet another translator is dead. He worked for an American newspaper and was driving home with his mother and two-year-old daughter when gunmen with silencers shot all three of them. There's a rumour that this was a revenge killing. So while we are outraged, we all secretly and cruelly hope it's revenge, not a collaborator killing, that has contaminated our hotel. I lean over my balcony and watch four miserable Iraqis from the Civil Defence patrolling the road below. One of them is lame. The last man, the lame one, is walking backwards and staring at the rooftops. Groceries in Karrada Kharaj, to a vast emporium crammed with the new Iraqi rich, middle class; the poor can't afford this place. There is fresh Danish butter, Austrian fruit juice, Perrier by the gallon. And then there are the cigars. Churchills at a quarter of the price of a European duty free, Cohibas at less than a third of their cost. Are these part of the untaxed imports with which the occupation authorities are trying to encourage the economy? Or part of the loot from Saddam's stores? In the evening, gunfire ripples across Jadriya, near the university - I hear it away as I write - and two American helicopters are thundering up in the darkness. I listen to this unreported battle, glad I didn't buy a bar of chocolate. At least 10 rockets exploded last night near the Baghdad headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority. There were no reports of casualties. The Katyusha rockets were fired towards the Convention Centre and the al-Rashid Hotel. The vehicle from which the rockets were fired blew up. Pentagon to Oversee
Most Spending in Iraq
By JIM KRANE BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP - 8 March) - After a power struggle with the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon has won control over most of a $18.4 billion aid package for Iraq, and rebuilding delayed for a month will start this week, U.S. officials in Baghdad said Sunday. Much of the enormous aid package - funded by U.S. taxpayers - will go toward 2,300 construction projects over the next four years. Of these, the State Department will oversee as little as 10 percent. But $4 billion of the aid package has been set aside, and spending authority for those funds is still in discussion. Congress approved the aid in November, but the bickering delayed contracts expected to be approved Feb. 2. The State Department had pushed for control, because it will become the top U.S. agency here after Iraqis are handed sovereignty June 30. Officials
were so frustrated by the delay that the U.S. head of
reconstruction in Iraq, retired Rear Admiral David J. Nash,
reportedly threatened to resign in December. Now, the resolution means the U.S.
military will have chief
control over rebuilding in Iraq, even after its command of the
U.S.-led occupation ends, officials said, speaking on condition of
anonymity.
Starting this week, about $5
billion worth of contracts are to
be awarded to 17 companies for projects in seven various sectors,
said Steven Susens, a spokesman for the Program Management Office,
which is overseeing the funds for the Pentagon-run U.S.-led
coalition authority.
He said 10 more big construction
projects will be handed out
later this month, and that his office expects to complete 2,300
projects over the next four years.
The decision gives the Defense
Department a much larger role in
shaping the reconstruction of Iraq.
The Pentagon currently controls
Iraq through its mainly civilian
proxy, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which is led by Iraq's
U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer.
Previously, the CPA's portfolio
was expected to be handed to the
State Department and run by staff of a future U.S. Embassy here,
restricting the U.S. military's role mainly to operating a
peacekeeping force.
But now, U.S. officials said, the
CPA's Program Management
Office will probably stay on after Iraqis take power, and will
answer to the U.S. Army's offices in Washington - not Secretary of
State Colin Powell.
``We needed an agency that could
manage this at the Washington,
D.C., level so it was decided that the Army would do this there,''
a CPA official told reporters in a Sunday briefing. He asked that
his name not be mentioned.
He also said that - despite
rock-bottom wages for Iraqi
construction workers - the cost of construction in Iraq is expected
to be higher than comparable building work in the United States.
Ten percent of the construction funds will be eaten up by
safeguarding building sites and workers from attacks by anti-U.S.
guerrillas, the official said. Companies will also have to pay to
house and feed workers.
Planners expect rebuilding to
touch the lives of every Iraqi,
providing electric power, clean water and sewage treatment, while
fixing the tattered oil industry - all of which have been ravaged
by three wars and a dozen years of U.N. sanctions and neglect.
By summer, the flow of dollars is
expected to turn Iraq into one
of the world's largest construction sites. U.S. officials hope the
revitalized infrastructure forms the bedrock for the Middle East's
most freewheeling economy.
The aid package amounts to nearly
two-thirds of Iraq's annual
economic output in 2002, estimated by the World Bank at $28
billion. But only an estimated 20 percent of the funds will be
spent inside Iraq - just under $2 billion each in 2004 and 2005.
The rest will go to foreign contractors and suppliers.
Already, almost $2 billion has
been released for priority
projects. More than $800 million is now being spent by the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers on refurbishing Iraq's tattered oil
infrastructure; another $900 million is going to renovate Iraqi
military bases and supply new security forces with weapons,
uniforms and training.
About $2.2
billion will be handed to U.S. AID, most of which is
earmarked for Bechtel, the construction firm that handles most of
its rebuilding work, Susens said. The additional funds for Iraq
have essentially doubled U.S. AID's 2004 worldwide budget.
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